I guess you could say “intern­ing” with Game­Zom­bie dur­ing Spring semes­ter started it and obtain­ing a sum­mer intern­ship with one of the largest com­pa­nies in the world kept it rolling, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I real­ized how close I am to enter­ing the pro­fes­sional world.I got a meet­ing setup through a refer­ral from Spencer about some poten­tial web design work in the Chicago area a few weeks ago. Where did we meet? NBC Tower in down­town Chicago. It was some­what infor­mal, held in one of the con­trol rooms. The meet­ing went great and after­wards I met up with my room­mate from Bloom­ing­ton who also had a sum­mer intern­ship in Chicago. We had din­ner with some of his friends at a small out­door place just a short walk from his build­ing at Van Buren and Michi­gan. Need­less to say, it was the breath of fresh air I had been look­ing for after being bored and dis­con­tent most of the sum­mer at Pur­due Calumet Uni­ver­sity Vil­lage where my intern­ship had put me up. After spend­ing most of my days tak­ing note of how I don’t want to live and work, I saw some promise to grow­ing up and enter­ing the real world.

Long story short, I wrote up a nice detailed quote and asked for a lit­tle more than usual for var­i­ous rea­sons. Some might have called it pretty fair, while oth­ers I’m sure would have quoted dou­ble. They called back and blah blah blah didn’t want to spend any money but would rather offer me a part­ner­ship in the new start-up. I could go on about how I really just wanted the cash, or how I was already pretty busy with GZ devel­op­ments not to men­tion my own, or how I’ve read free­lanc­ing tips that stay steer clear of these projects because there is rarely any money to be made in the end. That made the most sense since these peo­ple were try­ing to launch a web-based com­pany, but couldn’t come up with a few grand for the ini­tial site. These peo­ple weren’t very tech­ni­cal and had no idea how a web­site is run (wel­come to the Mid­west) so I tried to be as nice as pos­si­ble in declin­ing. My main excuse was that come Sep­tem­ber 1st I would be busy try­ing to get a real job that actu­ally pays money (yea, I think it actu­ally slipped out like that over the phone :-X).

I’ve since taken that excuse and turned it into a rea­son to be as pro­duc­tive as pos­si­ble over the next 6 weeks. I started small by cross­ing off the Euchre page on my to-do list and even started (and con­tinue) to blog. You can only do so much from behind a key­board, though, which is why I booked a plane ticket to San Fran­cisco yes­ter­day and today I reserved my seat for the Blog Indi­ana 2008 con­fer­ence.

Ok, so I’m really going to visit my girl­friend in the Bay area, but I’m won­der­ing if I can write it off as a busi­ness expense for R&D of my career path. As much as I love ChaCha, the big play­ers are still in the val­ley and I’d be lying if I told you work­ing for Face­book or Apple aren’t my dream jobs right now. There is a pos­si­bil­ity I could go west after grad­u­at­ing and hate it, but with all that sun­shine and inno­va­tion I’m pretty con­vinced it’s where I want to be.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I still have a whole year left at IU and haven’t writ­ten off stay­ing in the mid­west com­pletely which is why I signed up for the blog­ger con­fer­ence and took part in their cen­sus. There’s no doubt there’s plenty of tech work in Indi­ana. I’m cur­rently sit­ting in an IT office where I can count employ­ees who aren’t dou­ble my age on one hand. I spent last sum­mer lis­ten­ing to all sorts of entre­prenuers in the Indi­anapo­lis area and my mom just cut out an arti­cle for me to read about a group of Infor­mat­ics grads who started their own design firm in Broad Rip­ple. I grew up in Broad Rip­ple so I know it well and have it on the top of my list for places in Indi­ana to stay.

Exactly a month after the blog­ger con­fer­ence is the School of Infor­mat­ics Fall IT Career Fair. This is where all the intern­ships, free­lance work, con­fer­ences, and research into aspects out­side of the job descrip­tion should hope­fully cul­mi­nate into many inter­views and some solid offers. Who knows what will hap­pen after that! All I know is that I sub­mit­ted this blog to the cen­sus say­ing it was about my jour­ney from now into the real world what­ever, how­ever, whereever that may be.